Get Up To Speed With Microsoft Office

Monthly Archives: April 2011

Using a Word template is a great way to create a document quickly. To create a new document based on a template, click the File tab > New. A selection of template categories is then displayed. When you select a category, for example Faxes, all templates within that category are displayed. You then need to select the template you want to use and click Download (on the right). Word then opens a new document based on the template you chose. You can change this document in any way you want, save it and/or print it.

As well as using existing templates, you can also create your own. If you create a document in Microsoft Word that you think you might like to use as a base for future documents, it’s a good idea to save it as a template. To do this, click the File tab > Save As and then do the following in the Save As window:

name the template – it helps to give the template a meaningful name, such as Meeting Agenda, or Invoice etc

change the Save as type to be Word Template (*.dotx)

navigate to the location on your hard drive where you want to save your template. But where…? This is an important question, as you’ll soon discover!

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Where Should You Save Word Templates?

If you save your template in the wrong place, Word won’t be able to find it. When you click the File tab > New, you get to see all the template categories, including My Templates. This is where all the templates you create yourself are stored.

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It has a special location on your hard drive, that is not obvious.

This location takes the form:

C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates

You should substitute “yourname” with the user id you sign on to your computer with. You can actually copy this location’s path and paste it into the address bar in the Save As window, and press Enter. Now you will find your template in the My templates category.

Word Template Location

If you’re an enterprising individual who likes to find things out for themselves, you can find the Word template location by doing the following:

click File > New, and select My Templates at the top

in the templates window that opens, right click on any template you see and select Properties

the Location is displayed about a third of the way down

often, the path is too long to display but if you hover it, you can see the full path in a tooltip

How you remove a password from a Word document will depend on how the password was assigned in the first place. The following password window requires you to enter the password to open the document:

… and the following window requires you to enter a password in order to modify the document:

Both of these passwords are set – and removed – in the same place. Once you have opened the document, click the File tab > Save as > Tools > General Options.

In the General Options window that opens, simply blank out the passwords that you want to remove and then click OK.

Additionally, if opening the document is password protected, you will see the following informational message in backstage view when you click the File tab.

There is also another way to remove the password required to open the document: if you click on the Protect Document button seen in the image above and then click Encrypt with Password, you will see the password window below.

Again, blank out the password and click OK to remove it.

Of course, the above only works if you are able to open the document in the first place, and that requires knowing the password.

Password Recovery Software

If you don’t know the password that was assigned to a document, then you won’t be able to use any of the above methods. Instead, you will have to use password recovery software. There is a variety of different software solutions for removing password from Office documents, and some of the more popular ones are: